PROVENANCE
Douglas Udell Gallery
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Pierre Théberge and Mayo Graham, Joe Fafard: The Bronze Years, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1996, another cast reproduced page 53
Terrence Heath, Joe Fafard, National Gallery of Canada, 2007, another cast reproduced page 171

EXHIBITED
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Joe Fafard: The Bronze Years, November 21, 1996 – February 16, 1997, another cast, catalogue #24
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Joe Fafard, February 1 – May 4, 2008, traveling in 2008 – 2009 to the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Glenbow Museum, Calgary; and Winnipeg Art Gallery, another cast, catalogue #50

In 1982, Joe Fafard began a series of portrait sculptures, depicting artists drawn from history who had inspired or held a particular significance to the Saskatchewan sculptor. This series would produce some of his best-known works, and it constituted an important part of his practice for the remainder of his life. The subjects were among the heavyweights of art history—van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Carr, Gaugin, O’Keeffe—and though he had never met them, Fafard rendered his evocative portraits with an intimate, lifelike familiarity.

Auguste is one of several portraits Fafard made depicting the French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This sculpture depicts Renoir in his later years and is based on a photograph taken near the end of his life at his home Les Collettes at Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice. (Rather than generating his sculptures from memory, as with his portraits of animals or friends, Fafard often derived his portraits of famous figures from existing photographs.) Renoir, though suffering from arthritis, remained an active painter, and here Fafard renders him in lively clarity with a ruddy face and knobby fingers. Wearing a flat cap and painter’s smock in a striking verdigris blue, the painter seems ready to spring to life. The subject was clearly a favourite of Fafard: in 2012, two decades after this work, he produced Renoir, a scaled-up bust of the painter in the same position.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars